Aircraft and other airborne bodies generally have very large structural components such as wings, tails or parts thereof, for example. For the automated production of the airborne vehicle, said structural components are engineered in correspondingly large processing stations and processed by various machine tools. An exemplary operating step provides for the automated fitting of a series of rivet connections, this often having to have been performed manually in the past.
The prior art, and especially U.S. Pat. No. 8,220,134 which is considered to be the closest prior art, discloses a processing station for structural aircraft components in which a rectangular mounting frame, as component carrier, is held at its lateral sides by two positioning towers and moved during processing. The mounting frame and the workpiece, or especially structural aircraft component, which is mounted on it can be moved as a result of independently vertically shifting the fastening points on the positioning towers and also rotating the mounting frame about the axis which is defined by the fastening points, such that processing by a tool, for example a riveting machine, at various points of the structural aircraft component is possible. This tool is in turn fastened to a C-frame which can move in the longitudinal direction of the mounting frame. This ensures that the tool can reach all of the points of the workpiece which are to be processed.
Owing to the size of the structural aircraft components already described, replacing the structural aircraft components after processing is very complicated.
It is not only necessary to remove the structural aircraft component, which has been completely processed at this processing station, from the mounting frame, but also to position and mount the next structural aircraft component which is still to be processed on the mounting frame—either directly or by means of a special suspension gear which provides the corresponding fastening points. This is not only time-consuming owing to the size of the structural aircraft components, but rather the very narrow tolerances which are required in the field of air and space travel also require extremely accurate positioning of the structural aircraft component on the mounting frame, so that, in the event of automated movement of the mounting frame and of the tool in relation to one another, the necessary operating points on the structural aircraft component can also be correctly controlled by the tool. The manual orientation of the structural aircraft component on the mounting frame known from the prior art also takes a correspondingly long time. The long downtime of the generally very expensive processing station which is required as a result of this accordingly reduces the level of utilization to a significant extent and therefore leads to considerably higher investment costs for each airborne body which is produced. Furthermore, the respective means for orienting the structural aircraft component on the mounting frame also has to ensure that the structural aircraft component does not slip or especially become detached from the mounting frame, in spite of the various movements of the mounting frame about several axes.
The problem of the invention is therefore that of further developing the processing station, which is known from the prior art, for structural aircraft components together with their constituent parts such that the downtime of the processing station when the structural aircraft components which are to be processed on the mounting frame are replaced can be shortened.